Brené Brown

Yes, I wake up in the morning and I read, because of the nature of my work, I read the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Financial Times.

Like, yeah, I mean, I read a lot.

But there's a chapter in the book that was one of my favorite to write on the transitions home from work and how tough they are.

And how, if you're like me, you've had a very frustrated partner look at you more than once in your life and say, hey, I know it was stressful.

I don't work for you.

Change gears.

Have you ever had that?

No comment?

Yeah.

I use a metaphor in that book, in this chapter, of a lock.

And how did that come to me?

Because I was reading the book series, The Rivers of London.

And in that book series, there are two gods of the Thames.

And the Teddington Lock is where, right outside of London in Teddington, is where custody changes for them.

So I went to the Teddington Lock because I was interested.

I met the lock master that runs the lock.

She gave me a three-hour lesson that day.

We let narrowboats through the Thames.

I learned how a lock works, and that's the metaphor that I use to talk about the research on what do we do when we spend all day locking in, hyper-focused, compartmentalizing, getting shit done.

And then instead of going home to our partner, when we get home, we spend 30 minutes in the garage on TikTok because we can't bear to go in.